Here comes the Radeon X700, ATI's answer to the NVIDIA GeForce 6600. How does …

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The last several months have seen the launch of next-generation video cards from ATI and NVIDIA. While the Radeon X800 and GeForce 6800 are locked in a struggle for supremacy at the high end of the video card market, the true battle for market share will be joined at the ~US$200 level. The NVIDIA GeForce 6600 GT was launched earlier this month to strong reviews, and at US$199, it easily outdid other cards in its price range. Enter the ATI Radeon X700.

The X700 is based on the RV410 chip. The RV410 has eight pipelines as opposed to the 16 in the RV420 that powers the X800 series. However, it has the six vertex shaders of the RV420. The X700 comes in four flavors, two of which (the X700 Pro and X700 XT) ship with the same 256MB that the X800 line sports, but with a 128-bit memory bus instead of 256. The base X700 is clocked at 400MHz, while the X700 Pro runs at 420MHz. Topping off the line, the X700 XT runs at 475MHz in both the 128MB and 256MB flavors.

So how does the newcomer stack up against NVIDIA's impressive GeForce 6600 GT? Decently, according to the reviews published thus far. Most benchmarks show the GeForce 6600 with the edge over ATI's newcomer. Doom 3 and FarCry may look better on the GeForce card. The key differences seem to be pixel shading, vertex shading, and fill rate. The X700 XT outperformed the 6600 GT in vertex shading, while the NVIDIA card seems to perform better with pixel shading and fill rate. Using ATI's Catalyst A.I. gave the X700 a performance boost on titles like Doom 3. As expected OpenGL performance is better on the 6600 line. Benchmarks aside, the X700 looks to offer impressive performance for the price, and along with the 6600 gives those who don't want to drop four or five bills on a video card a solid option. It's good to see ATI and NVIDIA carrying their battle to the US$150-200 price range.